Anarchy in Los Angeles: Who Fanned the Flames, and Why?

The images of a city aflame, riotous mobs, and federal troops have faded from the television screens and front pages of our newspapers, but they are still lodged in the consciousness of millions of Americans. The terrifying scenes of mass conflagration and marauding thugs savagely beating hapless passersby, juxtaposed on surreal scenes of looters pillaging in an almost carnival-like atmosphere, are hard to shake. They demonstrate how fragile is the structure and the veneer of our civilization, and how vulnerable we all are.

The 1965 Watts riots left 34 dead, more than 1,000 injured, and 4,000 arrested for arson and looting. Two hundred buildings were destroyed and another 400 were damaged. The toll in property damage reached about $183 million (in current dollars, adjusted for inflation). The toll for this year's rioting in Los Angeles is: 58 dead (and climbing), 2,383 injured, 17,000 arrests (although the district attorney's count and the police records differ by several thousand arrests), 10,000 fire calls (the actual number of fires, and structures destroyed, is still unknown) and property damage estimated at $785 million to $1 billion.

Besides the escalation in death and destruction, the rioting set off new alarms by spreading to areas that had not experienced this kind of turmoil before. Unlike the 1965 disorder that was largely confined to the Watts-Compton-Inglewood-South Central Los Angeles area, this time violence and mayhem also broke out in Long Beach, San Pedro, Pasadena, Pomona, El Monte, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and many points in between. Violent disorders also erupted in San Francisco, New York, San Diego, Seattle, Atlanta, Las Vegas, and other cities. Southern California especially, and the United States in general, seemed to be unraveling, disintegrating, incinerating.

As in the aftermath of Watts, we are inundated with "experts" claiming to know both the causes of and the cures for the "social unrest" and "civil turmoil." According to these "experts," nothing has changed. The immediate cause of the riots, past and present, they say, is "police brutality and racism." But the broader, underlying causes, according to "expert" wisdom, are economic inequality, poverty, and desperation. As Jesse Jackson reminded us, "Desperate people do desperate things."

"No Justice! No Peace!"

As everyone knows, the pretext for the recent rioting was the verdict delivered in the Los Angeles suburb of Simi Valley on April 29th that found four Los Angeles Police Department officers "not guilty" of criminal charges in the beating and arrest of Rodney King. For over a year prior to the trial, the people of Los Angeles had been subjected to a massive hate and disinformation campaign about the incident in particular and about the LAPD in general, A "censored" version of the famous videotape of the arrest was shown countless times to Los Angeles viewers and to the nation. The print and broadcast media repeatedly referred (and continue to refer) to the "81-second video" as proof positive of the brutal abuse visited upon King by the officers in question.

"Liberal" politicians, professional "civil rights" activists, the ACLU, and the media had built up public expectations that the videotape evidence made this an open-and-shut case. What most people saw of the video with their own eyes tended to confirm that. So the acquittal by a jury portrayed as a bunch of redneck racists is understandably hard to swallow for a lot of fair-minded, decent folks.

The problem is that, except for a few scattered broadcasts, the full 81 seconds of videotape has not been broadcast. What the public has seen over and over are portions of the last 66 seconds of the tape that show the police officers clubbing King with their batons. Admittedly, it is painful to watch, and would seem to provide irrefutable evidence of wanton police brutality, at worst, and excessive use of force, at best. But what has been carefully excluded from nearly all public showings of the world's most seen home video is the critical first 15 seconds.

Seeing Is Believing?

But what could possibly controvert the seemingly incontrovertible visual evidence of inexcusable abuse? What difference could 15 seconds of tape, or any other evidence, make when the "proof" is so plain to see? The LAPD, often accused of brutality by "civil libertarians" and "minority rights" advocates, had this time been caught flagrante delicto. The home video shot by George Holliday finally proves it. Or does it? To the contrary, said the jury, the videotape in its entirety shows something quite different from the "censored" version shown repeatedly to television viewers throughout the land. The complete video, together with 58 witnesses and over 200 exhibits, persuaded the jury that the officers might not be sadistic monsters and Rodney King might not have been the hapless, passive victim most viewers saw in the censored video.

Indeed, some of the jurors were persuaded by the weight of the evidence that King was responsible for the treatment he received. "He refused to get out of the car," one of the jurors told the Los Angeles Times. "His two companions got out of the car and complied with all the orders and he just continued to fight. So the Police Department had no alternative. He was obviously a dangerous person, massive size and threatening actions .... Mr. King was controlling the whole show with his actions."

The juror was loudly denounced as an idiot, a racist, and worse. In recreating the arrest and beating, however, the defense did not have much difficulty establishing that Rodney King was acting in a very bizarre and threatening manner on the evening of March 3, 1991. After leading police units from several jurisdictions on a long, high-speed chase — during which he slowed several times almost to a stop as if to comply, then sped away again — he stopped and was surrounded by an armada of squad cars. Initially, he refused to get out of the car, as ordered repeatedly by the officers. Finally, according to witnesses, he did get out of the car, faced the car and placed his hands on the hood. Then, unexpectedly, he turned and began dancing a jig, laughing, and pointing up at the hovering police helicopter. A female California Highway Patrol officer approached, gun drawn. King bent over, patted his backside, and "mooned" her. Apparently oblivious to the danger of the potential lethal force arrayed against him, King continued to dance about.

Officers of the LAPD Foothill Division then took over and repeatedly ordered King to lay face down on the ground — which he eventually did. Officers Laurence Powell and Timothy Wind then approached him and reached down to grab his hands and put them behind his back to be cuffed. As they grabbed his hands, he pushed up forcefully, sending Officer Powell rolling over. Officer Wind was able to keep his balance and backed off. At this point, several officers rushed him with the "swarm technique," an arrest procedure used with combative subjects in which each officer grabs an arm, a leg, the torso, or the head, and — by sheer force of weight, strength, and numbers — attempts to overpower and immobilize the suspect.

King managed to stay on his feet, swing from side to side, and shake the officers off. It should be noted that King is no pint-sized wimp. At six foot four inches and 260 muscular pounds, he is an imposing bull of a man.

Taser Failure

Realizing that the "swarm" was futile, Sergeant Stacey Koon ordered his men to back off and prepared to stun King with the electric Taser gun. He ordered King to lay down again. King ignored the order and advanced toward Koon. Koon fired. The two "darts," which are connected by wires to the Taser battery, shot out and connected with King, but had no effect. Koon fired the second round. The electric jolt knocked King down on the ground -- but only for several seconds. Normally (around 80 percent of the time), when the Taser delivers its 50,000 low-amperage volts, the subject is immediately incapacitated. The shock renders him helpless; he loses all muscle control and lays twitching on the ground for several minutes. The shock causes no permanent injury and makes it easy for the police to cuff the suspect, without danger to themselves, the suspect, or others.

The Taser is supposed to fulfill the role of the upper body restraint, or "chokehold," which is now banned in Los Angeles and many other cities. Although the hold had been proven safe and effective in many thousands of arrests, in a small number of celebrated cases it proved fatal. So it was outlawed. But no substitute was provided. For various reasons -- equipment malfunction, presence of drugs in the subject, or other factors -- the Taser is ineffective in about 20 percent of cases. When it fails or is not available, the police officer is left with his baton and his gun.

Unfortunately, in the case of Rodney King, the Taser failed to do its job. It was just after the second Taser round was fired, while King was still down on all fours, that the Holliday video focused in on the action. What the jurors, and a relatively small segment of the television-viewing public, saw was a decidedly non-passive Rodney King rise up and charge into Officer Powell. It was then that the rain of baton blows began.

Whenever the King story is reported in the press, Rodney King is invariably identified as a "black motorist" or a "black, unemployed construction worker," never as a convicted felon on parole who was drunk the night he led police on a high-speed chase through the streets of Los Angeles. A urine test showed King also had marijuana residue in his system. This may have been a factor in his behavior the night of his arrest. His behavior and strength were consistent with that of someone on PCP or other drugs, and gave the officers reason to feel threatened, the defense claimed. They had tried everything and had failed. Short of shooting him with their guns, they had no other alternative, save to use their batons.

After having considered the whole, uncensored video and the entire body of trial evidence, reasonable people may still disagree over the verdicts. But the false image portrayed by the media and the political demagogues of a meek, helpless, compliant black man being viciously and unmercifully beaten by sadistic, racist, white cops, is such an obvious distortion of the facts that one can only surmise that we are dealing with willful deception.

Deputy District Attorney Terry L. White, the black prosecutor in the case, could not find evidence of racial motivation behind the incident. Although King now claims the officers used racial slurs during the arrest, White notes that both King and his attorney, Steven Lerman, stated publicly after the arrest that it was not a racial incident. Moreover, says White, "None of the witnesses we talked to heard racial epithets" at the scene. Neither could the prosecutors hear racial epithets on the videotape of the beating, even after enhancing the sound.

Burn Baby Burn!

But that isn't what the major media and many opinion molders who fanned the flames of violence wanted to hear. The Los Angeles Times, which has been in the forefront of the hate campaign against the LAPD and Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates for many years, denounced the acquittal as a "terrible jury verdict in a horrible police-beating case." And the Los Angeles Daily News declared that "we saw the videotape of the King beating repeatedly .... What the tape showed was nothing less than a police riot."

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley went on television with an inflammatory condemnation of the verdict: "I was stunned. I was shocked. | was outraged when I heard that verdict," he exclaimed with vehemence. "No, our eyes did not deceive us. We saw what we saw. What we saw was a crime. No, we will not tolerate the savage beating of our citizens by a few renegade cops .... The jury's verdict will never outlive the images of the savage beating seared forever into our minds and our souls."

On Thursday, May 7th, at a march and rally at the state capitol in Sacramento, State Assemblyman Curtis Tucker told the crowd, "If it gets back to normal, we'll burn this state down!" Ironically, Tucker, a black legislator from Inglewood, where much of the rioting took place, had been appointed earlier in the day to chair the Assembly committee to investigate the Los Angeles riots.

Guerilla Warfare

One of the media's favorite hate-spewers today is Michael R. McGee, an organizer of the Black Panther Militia and an alderman on the Milwaukee City Council. He has put the city of Milwaukee on notice that, come 1995, if things haven't changed to his satisfaction, he's all for violence. What kind of violence? "Sniping at tires going on the freeway, sabotage, tearing down electrical wires. You know, complete chaos and confusion outside of our community." Appearing on the Donahue show in January 1991, McGee stated: "So when you talk about guerilla warfare, that's what we're talking about, undercover, because we're fighting a superior armed enemy, so we will use what we call 'urban guerilla warfare tactics.'"

In his "urban guerilla warfare" strategy, McGee stated on a Washington DC-area radio station, "Protesters might start throwing fire bombs into the Bradley Center [the basketball arena of the Milwaukee Bucks]." Just the kind of calming personality you'd want to put on the air during a riot, right? Apparently that's what radio/television talk show host Larry King thinks. On May 4th, while Los Angeles and many other cities lay in smoldering ruins and civil strife and racial tensions boiled at near-record highs, Larry King Live featured the incendiary Mr. McGee. Sitting in for Larry King, substitute host Bob Beckel let the hatemonger stoke the fires. Said McGee: "You know, we had riots in 1930, 1929, 1960, the 90's. And now we're going to have them in the year 2000, except they're going to be, hopefully, what I call an insurrection, versus a riot, where we actually take complete control of our lives."

Beckel asked: "Are you suggesting by the word 'insurrection' that you're talking about an armed insurrection, Mr. McGee?" To which McGee responded: "Yes, I'm talking about something that 1 am right now organizing, and that needs to be organized, that will make these riots look like a Fourth of July picnic."

A short time later in the program, McGee took his heady revolutionary ideas to a much higher plane than his common variety of street thug usually manages to attain. "But then, you've also got to remember," he said, "that if the UN could go into Beirut, if they go into Lebanon, if they go into Iraq, eventually the UN, I think, is going to have to come in here, because what I'm talking about organizing is something that's going to be called urban guerilla warfare. It's something that's not going to be fought like a riot."

Though none of these public figures is likely ever to be prosecuted for incitement to riot, they are morally more culpable of the crime than the actual mobs in the streets. From their positions of status and authority, they provided justification for rioting and lawlessness and continued to stir the boiling caldron even as some pretended to appeal for calm and peace.

Equally important, if not more important, in stirring up the youth to riot-stage levels, is the left/liberal, anti-American, anti-Christian cultural media. Gangsta Rap music with a rebellious, destructive theme is fuel to the fire. One of the most candidly nihilistic and racist of today's rap stars, Sister Souljah, was feted on many of the major media outlets during the urban riots. In the May 13th Washington Post, in an article entitled "Sister Souljah's Rebellion Rap," the black rapper was asked if she thought it was wise for the rioters to torch their own communities. "Yeah, it was wise," she replied. "I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?"

"Souljah was not born to make white people feel comfortable," she says on her album entitled, The Hate ThatHate Produced. "I am African first. I am black first. I want what's good for me and my people first. And if my survival means your total destruction, then so be it. You built this wicked system. They say two wrongs don't make it right, but it damn sure makes it even." That is the kind of racist, hateful propaganda that wins her respectful audiences with Bill Moyers on PBS, appearances on NBC's Sunday Today and Black Entertainment Television, and a recording contract with Epic Records.

Big Red Machine

But the holocaust that engulfed much of Southern California during the last days of April and the first days of May did not spring entirely from the Rodney King verdict and the inflammatory bombast of the type cited above. Evidence accumulated over the past several decades, and new evidence still coming in from the recent social earthquake, argues persuasively that the riots we have just lived through were no more spontaneous than the communist-directed riots of earlier decades.

In the early 1960s, the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) was very disturbed by the fact that Los Angeles and Southern California were becoming politically more conservative. The Reds realized that Los Angeles was growing rapidly in importance as an economic, political, and cultural center, and they could not afford to allow this trend to continue. Los Angeles had to be taken. In order to do that, the LAPD, famous then as ramrod straight and free of corruption, had to be destroyed. And someone sympathetic to the Party's program had to be elected as mayor. The man who the Party determined was best qualified to fulfill both objectives was a black city councilman and former policeman by the name of Thomas Bradley. "The election of Bradley," said the April 3, 1969 issue of the communist Daily World, published in New York, "is viewed by political observers as providing a major opening towards reversal of the conservative voting trend in California in recent years." Likewise, the People's World, the Communist Party newspaper in California, reported that "the election will be a major test of the state's political climate, of the chances to reverse in 1970 and 1972 the marked rightward drift manifested in California's recent general elections."

During his unsuccessful election bid for mayor's office in 1969, it came to light that Bradley's top campaign organizer and political manager was veteran Communist Party functionary Don Rothenberg. In April 1969, Gus Hall, general secretary of the CPUSA, traveled to Los Angeles to tell the comrades that they had "a historic responsibility" to see that Bradley was elected mayor. The communist newspapers People's World and DailyWorld both strongly supported the Bradley campaign, as the whole Party apparatus went to work on his behalf. As a longtime member of the ACLU, Bradley also drew support from the ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild (the "legal bulwark of the Communist Party"), and the Hollywood Left. But he also attracted curious support from the Eastern Establishment. Council on Foreign Relations member Senator Charles Percy, a Republican, came out west to support him. And Bradley was invited to become a member of the CFR and, later, the Trilateral Commission.

Cultivated Conflict

During his tenure as mayor in the 1970s and '80s, Bradley continued and escalated the bitter adversarial role he had developed with the LAPD while on the city council. He favored establishing a police "civilian review board," one of the CPUSA's longtime goals. In the early 1980s, a coalition of communist organizations and individuals, including the CPUSA, launched a massive lawsuit and propaganda campaign against the LAPD. The communists accused the department of illegally spying on them. Bradley and his city council sided with the revolutionaries rather than the police department. As a result, the LAPD's intelligence unit was neutered, the department's intelligence files were turned over to the Reds, and a couple million of the city taxpayers' dollars were paid out in settlements to the subversives for "damages." Legal representation for the comrades was provided by the ACLU of Southern California.

The head of the ACLU of Southern California at that time was multi-millionaire Belair Estates industrialist Stanley Sheinbaum (CFR). Yes, the same Stanley Sheinbaum who has presided over some of the most vicious attacks by the ACLU against the LAPD, and who Bradley now has heading the Los Angeles Police Commission. As president of the commission, Sheinbaum now works to destroy the department from the inside. But a major obstacle to the plans of Bradley, Sheinbaum, and company was Chief Daryl Gates. Protected by civil service, he could not be fired, unless dereliction of duty or malfeasance in office could be proved.

Last year, when the Rodney King incident broke, Bradley, Sheinbaum, the ACLU, et al had the golden opportunity they were looking for. A special commission was set up to investigate the LAPD. Headed by Jimmy Carter's former Deputy Secretary of State, Warren Christopher (CFR, Trilateral Commission), it came up with the expected recommendations, including: Gates should retire; the department should completely revamp its policing and training practices; and the city charter should be amended to make the police chief a political appointee of the mayor, serving completely at the pleasure of the mayor.

"Gates Must Go"

Since Gates did not agree to retire according to the Bradley/ACLU timetable, the "Gates Must Go" campaign was kicked into high gear. This was led, principally, by the Los Angeles Times, which has been especially vicious and unfair in its attacks on Gates and the department. But the rest of the Establishment media has piled on. In July of last year, for instance, the New York Times, in an editorial titled "The L.A.P.D.'s Thin, Savage Blue Line," characterized the force as an "ugly subculture" whose "military swagger invites misconduct." This has been a common theme in the attacks on the LAPD -- that they are a bunch of "macho" militarists who like to beat up on minorities, and who don't really do a good job of policing.

Assistant Police Chief Robert A. Vernon, in a recent public speech, tackled that canard head-on. The hard facts, says the police department's (former) number two man (Vernon has recently retired), is that the LAPD is one of the most effective law enforcement organizations in existence.

Usually, said Vernon, the critics try to compare the Los Angeles police force's performance unfavorably to that of police forces in the other five of the "Big Six" (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Houston) U.S. cities. "If you go by the F.B.I.'s category of 'Part One' crime -- serious crimes including robbery, burglary, kidnapping, murder -- L.A. rated 34th in the nation. All of the other 'Big Six' cities rated near the top, with much higher levels of 'Part One' crime." When it comes to murder, said Vernon, Los Angeles is down at 15th in the nation "and, again, all of the other 'Big Six' cities were ahead of us, and most of them were in the top ten."

"We're effective," emphasizes Vernon, citing still more crime-fighting statistics. "What's more, we do it with about half the officers." For example, he points out, "Los Angeles has twice the area in square miles as Chicago and a population of at least one half million more. Los Angeles has only 7,800 officers; Chicago has 12,000 -- and higher crime." Los Angeles fields less than two sworn officers per 1,000 residents, the lowest ratio in the nation, and less than five per square mile, the second lowest. New York City has 3.7 per 1,000 and 88.6 per square mile.

The LAPD, says Commander Larry Fetters, a 28-year veteran with the force, has "higher productivity" than any other police department in North America because "we're scientifically innovative; we have a high level of civilian personnel taking care of much of the clerical work, to free more officers for field police work; we have a high degree of community assistance; and we are vigorously pro-active." By "pro-active" he means, "Our officers don't get into the squad car, roll up the window, turn on the air conditioner and then sit and wait for the radio dispatcher to tell them of a crime in progress." LAPD officers are. very active in patrolling the community and searching out criminal activity before it is reported.

Thin Blue Line

But during the recent rioting, the thin blue line was stretched to the breaking point, Fellers told THE NEW AMERICAN. In 1991, the LAPD was able to respond to emergency calls, on average, within seven minutes, and officers were able to allow roughly one-half of their work time to pro-active policing. But, in the past year, due to city budget cuts and a hiring freeze, the police department lost nearly 500 officers through attrition. The response time dropped to between seven and-one-half and eight minutes, and pro-active policing time dropped to less than 30 percent.

When the riots erupted, the department was overwhelmed. "We were already operating on bare bones," said Fellers, "and with our limited resources we responded [to the massive rioting] the best we could." The current LAPD budget of $533 million, out of a city budget of $3.8 billion, is, according to Fellers, "per capita, the lowest budget of any police force in America."

Incredibly, the same politicians who refuse to allocate sufficient funds for the department, and the critics who scream constantly about "excessive force," are the very ones who are now accusing the department of not being adequately prepared for the riots, and of acting like "cowards" and "wimps." Gates vouches unconditionally for the valor of his men and women in blue. But in a recent interview he acknowledged, "I know police officers on the street are scared to death to use any kind of force because they think they're going to be second-guessed." Now the department critics have appointed another investigative commission, this time headed by William Webster, former head of the CIA and FBI, to look into the LAPD's "inadequate" response to the riots in the early stages.

Force Behind the Riots

One of the things the commission and the critics are not likely to mention is that if the department's intelligence unit had not been so crippled by ACLU-imposed restraints, they might have known further in advance about plans for the riots. One of the organizations involved in instigating violence at several of the riot sites was the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block said in a May 3rd interview that there was "no question" that members of the RCP were involved in rioting, looting, and arson at a number of locations in Los Angeles. The RCP and other communist groups have been "working" the various ethnic and immigrant groups for years and have become expert in crowd manipulation, especially during times when passions are inflamed. Almost every May Day, they engage in some physical, violent confrontation with the police. It just so happened that this year May Day (May 1st) coincided almost perfectly with the Rodney King verdict.

The RCP's inflammatory flyers are scattered all over the city. In one of them, dated May 9th, national RCP Spokesman Carl Dix declares:

This racist system delivered its statement [the King verdict] last week .... This outrage has to be fought .... We got to make this part of getting ready for The Time -- and it could come soon -- to wage revolutionary war.

The RCP's newspaper, Revolutionary Worker, on May 10th carried this headline over a full page photo of rioters: "Los Angeles It's Right to Rebel!" The following is a sample of its text: "Amerikkka today is not the same Amerikkka it was before the King verdict .... It shows the deep truth of Mao's words: 'It is right to rebel'... there is more to come."

These true believers in communism as practiced by Pol Pot's genocidal regime in Cambodia are affiliated with the Committee of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, which, they say, "unites Maoist organizations from around the world including from the Western Imperialist countries, such as the USA, and the Middle East, as well as the Communist Party of Peru (known as Sendero Luminoso)." The Sendero Luminoso, or "Shining Path," is the terrorist group responsible for the murders of thousands of civilians in Peru. The group has provided President Fujimori with reason to impose dictatorial martial law. Could that be their objective here? At any rate, "Shining Path" has sent some of its terrorist brethren from Peru to tour America, and they regularly show "Shining Path" propaganda videos (including videos of riots and guerilla warfare).

Protection from City Hall

One might think that, especially in light of the recent upheavals, it would be wise for police intelligence to keep an eye on these Reds. Sorry. Sheinbaum, the ACLU, and the Police Commission say no. Members of the RCP participated in (and maybe precipitated) the riot at Parker Center, the LAPD's headquarters. Did they also play a role at the intersection of Florence and Normandie, the "flashpoint" where white truck driver Reginald Denny and other motorists were brutalized on live TV? Did members of the RCP or other trained agitators keep the crowd at that riotous intersection from dispersing when the outnumbered police made a tactical retreat?

According to one account in the Los Angeles Times: "As officers got in their cars and sped off, the crowd at first seemed about ready to disperse. But suddenly, for reasons that are not clear, the largely black crowd got a new sense of purpose -- the venting of racial hatred. In the videotape, someone picked up a metal sandwich board advertising Marlboros and slammed it through the rear window of a Volvo heading west on Florence. The riot was on." Who provided the "sense of purpose"? And who smashed the window? Just a neighborhood youth? A gang member? Or someone with an agenda? Familiarity with the communists' modus operandi in past dots is reason enough to suspect the latter.

But there is more. Consider, for instance, one of the large inflammatory signs placed at the intersection immediately following the verdict: "Black men and women are fair game for the shooting and beating at the hands of Gates' gang, known as the LAPD." Typical of the agit-prop for which communists are famous. Similar signs appeared elsewhere.

The RCP is just one of many communist outfits operating in Los Angeles. The Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), the Communist Party/Marxist-Leninist (CP/ML), the Socialist Organizing Network (SON), and, of course, the CPUSA, are all working the streets, unaware that "the Cold War is over."

A PLP flyer on the streets and campuses during the riots exhorted the people: "AVENGE THE KING VERDICT! ORGANIZE TO FIGHT AGAINST RACISM, MARCH ON MAY DAY FOR JOBS & WORKERS' POWER! ALL THE RACIST COPS MUST PAY!... TURN THE GUNS AROUND! SOLDIERS UNITE WITH THE WORKERS!... The verdict shows WE CANNOT GET JUSTICE UNDER THIS SYSTEM! THIS SYSTEM CANNOT BE REFORMED!"

Bradley, Sheinbaum, and company are now using the destruction of the riots, and the unrest that they and the street-level revolutionaries continue to foment, to complete their destruction of the LAPD, and to justify calls for increased federal intervention and massive new spending increases for socialist, New Deal/Great Society welfare programs.

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